Review Sections

Design

Someone on Clickfree's design team obviously likes piano-black plastic, as the Clickfree Wireless sports the same fingerprint magnet plastic design of the C2 Portable Backup Drive we reviewed recently. Like the C2, the Wireless also features an embedded USB 2.0 cable, a feature we've never been particularly fond of, simply because if the cable snaps or breaks, there's no easy way to access the data within. Unlike the C2, you don't get an optional mini-USB port, however. What you do get is an AC adapter port, used for powering the drive when it's in stand-alone wireless mode.

Features

As the name suggests, the Clickfree Wireless' party piece is that it performs wireless backup to any wirelessly connected computer on your local network. It's not a process of plugging it into power and forgetting about it, however; firstly, you've got to directly connect it via the USB cable to each system you want to backup and allow the same backup software that the C2 uses to perform a backup and install a system utility. The Clickfree Wireless only works at a document level, and won't backup system files or executables, but in most cases you should be able to reinstall those in case of a backup disaster anyway.

The Wireless drive — we tested the AU$199 500GB version, with a AU$299 1TB version due soon — is NTFS formatted but offers cross compatibility between PC and Mac systems via an NTFS driver. That's not exactly a flawless proposition, though, as we discovered during our testing.

Performance

Like the C2, the whole promise of the Clickfree Wireless is simplicity. You plug it into each computer on your wireless network in turn, create a backup and then just plug it into a power source, at which point it'll perform scheduled backups from each system, or can be set to run manually from a system tray icon at will. It's exactly the sort of fire and forget backup that most users could really utilise, simply because again and again we hit tales of woe from people who don't think about hard drive failure until all their data is gone.

Alex Kidman is a freelance word writing machine masquerading as a person, a disguise he's managed for over fifteen years now, including a three year stint at ZDNet/CNET Australia. He likes cats, retro gaming and terrible puns.
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